1. Field of Invention
The invention relates generally to the field of data storage in computer systems and, more specifically, to a user interface for representing the status of copying activities between source-target pairs of storage resources in a storage server or other storage device.
2. Description of Related Art
Computer systems such as storage area networks (SANs) increasingly rely on storage products such as storage servers to store massive amounts of data. The computer systems can provide data sharing among hosts, peer-to-peer copying with other storage servers, and immediate or “flash” copying of data for backup, data mining and other uses; An administrator or other user of the storage server manages and oversees its activities by selecting specific source and target storage resources for copying data. In a copying process, data is copied from the source resource to the target resource in the pair. To this end, it is important for the user to be able to quickly identify available resources and to monitor the progress of the copying. However, existing user interfaces have not been satisfactory in presenting all relevant information to the user at one time, including the status of storage resources that are part of one or more source-target pairs. Moreover, existing user interfaces have not been satisfactory in enabling the user to select source-target pairs of storage resources.